Alarm and security systems generally signal alarm conditions by contacting a central station upon the occurrence of a predetermined condition such as an intrusion or break-in on a premise under surveillance. Alarm signals are typically digital data signals that are sent over a telephone line from the premises to the central station where actions may be taken such as dispatching local police. In certain cases, in response to an alarm signal, it is desired to initiate a two-way voice telephone call to confirm if a request for police dispatch or other event(s) should be initiated. Hence, if an alarm signal is transmitted from a home to the central station, an operator at the central station may attempt to initiate a voice conversation with the homeowner to ascertain if there is genuinely a trouble condition. The operator would request that the homeowner pronounce a code confirmation into a two-way speakerphone panel located in the home. If the homeowner does not respond with the expected code, or if other problems are apparent through the voice connection, then the operator may make the decision to initiate an event, such as to inform and/or dispatch the local police, private security personnel, firefighters, or others. This two-way voice feature helps reduce false alarms and increases speed of response, among other things.
While this type of service is employed with POTS (plain old telephone system) lines, the use of cellular telephone systems causes new problems in this area, because the alarm signals that must be sent as digital data signals are not successfully transmitted over the voice channel of the cellular network due, for example, to the CODECs (coder-decoders) used by the cellular network. That is, while digitized voice signals can be acceptably transmitted over a cellular network, the digital data used for the alarm signal prior to the two-way voice conversation is not transmitted with acceptable fidelity. Hence an alarm signal must be transmitted over a data channel or data connection of a cellular network. Thus, the techniques employed by traditional systems, such as POTS, to associate the digital data alarm signals with the resulting two-way voice telephone call do not successfully operate with the current cellular networks. Consequently, a system and/or method that associates an incoming alarm signal with a voice channel or telephone line over which voice communication can be performed is needed.